ON THE WSWS
Donate to
the WSWS!

News Feed
Contact the
WSWS
Editorial Board
New Today
News & Analysis
Workers Struggles
Arts Review
History
Science
Polemics
Philosophy
Correspondence
Archive
About WSWS
About the ICFI
Help
Books Online

OTHER
LANGUAGES
German
French
Italian
Russian
Polish
Czech
Serbo-Croatian
Spanish
Portuguese
Turkish
Sinhala-
Tamil
Indonesian

LEAFLETS
Download in
PDF format

WSWS : News & Analysis : Asia : The Philippines

An exchange on the anti-Estrada movement in the Philippines

13 February 2001

Use this version to print | Send this link by email

The following is an exchange of correspondence over the article “Behind the façade of People Power: Philippine military and big business join hands to oust Estrada” that appeared on the World Socialist Web Site on January 31. In the initial email, EDSA or EDSA 1 refers to the protest movement that ended with the fall of the Marcos dictatorship in 1986. A shrine was erected at the site of the demonstrations which became a focus for the recent protests that led to the replacement of President Joseph Estrada by Vice President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. The main leaders of the anti-Estrada movement, which the writer refers to as EDSA 2, were former presidents Cory Aquino and Fidel Ramos along with Archbishop Jaime Sin all of whom also played key roles in 1986. "Trapo"”is a derogatory term for a traditional Filipino politician.

Dear editor,

I would like to comment on the article about the Philippine people power 2 featured in Jan. 31 and written by Peter Symonds. I am a Filipina who is currently pursuing studies here in Germany and at the same time working in a German NGO called Asien Stiftung. I am also a member of a political party called AKBAYAN (Citizens Action Party) whose members are coming from various left formations in the Philippines. If you are not familiar with our party I would like to invite you to view our homepage at www.akbayan org.

Very much like EDSA 1 there is a struggle for interpretation about EDSA 2. For most of us coming from the left who worked hard to oust Estrada (not just by being physically present there in the Philippines but also through various efforts worldwide), it leaves a bad taste in the mouth to see how the post-EDSA 2 government is heading. However, the current situation now should not diminish what EDSA 2 is all about.

The treatment on EDSA in the article is a skewed view about that historic event. Generally it is an unfair interpretation of EDSA 2 and the gross mistakes in Symonds analysis are perhaps due to misunderstandings with the Phil. political culture. While reading his piece, I thought I was reading something from some lost time—it was totally out of sync, he simply missed the point. And he even over-rated the military at that while undermining the role of the people! Perhaps it is one shortcoming of someone too obsessed with conspiracy theory. EDSA should be viewed with a cautious attitude about the works of the trapos, an appreciation towards the gains however small for the left forces, and what it means for the unorganised sections of the population who launched that action because they are just fed up with the kind of government that Estrada represents.

It is interesting to note, based from the character of your organisation, how the article scoffed at a real demonstration of direct participation by the people. This is a total denial of a people's self expression of what they want and their capacity to enact that will. Credit should be given where it is due, the Filipinos deserve to be recognised as the true initiator, mobiliser, maintainer, and winner of EDSA 2. The mobilisations did not just started in January and EDSA was not the only convergence, the efforts for new politics and real transformation towards democracy has always been a part of our political fabric. It is true that the anti-corruption sentiments just swelled after the Sept. revelations of Singson and people from all walks of life had been gathering and making their voices heard since then in all public parks in the provinces as well. They did that voluntarily, not because of Cory or Cardinal Sin or ex-Pres. Ramos, and definitely not for Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. It was simply an act of a people who were sorely tested all these years and pushed to the limits by the rampant corruption in government. It was simply the Filipino people, calling for new governance. Such a pity that your organisation found that so hard to believe.

The military and the business groups alone could not bring that event into reality even if they use all their resources. That LA Times article has some truth in it. But the military is not united under one leader or one group, in fact EDSA 2 made explicit the lack of cohesion within the military. There were articles in Phil. Daily Inquirer about the planned military takeover. The planned defection made last Nov. was scheduled to take effect on the 20th of January. The plan was known to the AFP Chief of Staff Angelo Reyes and it was supposed to be like: the AFP felt obliged to settle the growing political crisis which is creating havoc in the economy. If there is an ungovernable situation like all the bombings and rampant demonstrations in the streets and there was no credible leader—with Estrada deep in the muck and Arroyo as an unacceptable and unpopular replacement—they should deliver the country out of the chaos and bring order. However, nobody predicted Jan. 16, the military was caught by surprise by that spontaneous outpouring of wrath when the 11 Senator-Jurors denied the prosecution that damning evidence against Estrada. EDSA 2 ran over that military plan hence they have lost the opportunity to claim it in the same way as EDSA 1. They were not able to predict that development and they could not claim leadership as well. In fact they felt they should support it otherwise they would be isolated and could not claim the spoils in the end. Unlike the military leaders in EDSA 1 who got elected (Ramos, Honasan, Enrile), none of the military generals will be as charismatic this time. I would agree that the division of spoils are getting the Ramos boys plum positions, but that is simply trapo politics at work.

Doesn't Symonds know that there were tons of conspiracies plotted in the Philippines and they were done not just by the military but even the most charismatic of leaders, but unless the Filipinos feel the issue—they will not get out of their houses and their daily grind to join it. Cory Aquino herself tried to mobilised what she thought as “her people” to support the campaign favoring the extension of the military bases treaty with the US in 1991. All the symbolism of her persona was of no use to sway the mind of the majority who want the bases out. The anti-bases demonstrations were far larger than what she was able to summon and that happened when she was still the President. Ramos tried to change the charter with the collaboration of the business community to prolong his rule. Even with the perceived successes of his administration the protest rallies loudly expressed the people's disagreement with his plans. What I am trying to say here is that, any leader or clique could plot all they want till they get blue in the face but without the sympathy of the people it will fail.

To address the point regarding the character of the crowd, it is true that it was largely middle class but the organised poor section of Phil. Society were there too. The crowd that made it break the 1 million margin on the 5th day came from a mixed set including the former pro-Erap poor who were converted. Call it a bandwagon effect but the poor went out and joined EDSA. That actually explains why Erap had to resort to hire all those lumpens and goons to show a pathetic display of the “poor”, the poor realised after all those televised court hearings and the media's play up of his posh houses how corrupt the government is. Hence the majority of them simply kept quiet and respected the EDSA mobilisations.

Also, it is a disservice to the tens of thousands of trade union members mobilised by the various factions of the left, the urban poor organisations, the women's groups, the organised gays and lesbians and all the students from university councils and young people who went not just in EDSA but there in the symbolic Mendiola as well to just sneeze at their five days of hard work of maintaining the crowd and inviting others to join in. The media focused too much in EDSA but there was also that “death march to Mendiola”. The trapos and the middle class were there but the organised left were in Mendiola, ready to get in. It was that group which gave Estrada that ultimatum. It seems that there is no acknowledgement to the mobilisational strength of the Philippine left, who after all these years of strife have found a reason to act together even tactically. Isn't it rather arrogant that while the whole Philippine left is acknowledging the event as a successful mobilisation, your organisation simply read it as a conspiracy by the military and business?

The business and the upper class have to help the mobilisation because they acknowledge that the parliament of the street is a stronger force than they are in toppling Estrada. Corruption is nothing new to them but Estrada's bunglings have already cost them too much loss. The stock exchange never recovered because of the scandal in April, and Estrada's greedy friends have tilted the playing field to an alarming level. This is the business' reason for joining in the anti-corruption movement, but they could not lead it and they know that.

That governor quoted in Los Angeles Times who dismissed the protest does not have any capacity to attract a crowd, much less fire the imagination and sentiments of his province mates. He was in that position because of the sorry condition of our politics, not because he deserves to win. The western media have also grossly underestimated the significance of EDSA 2. Western media has forgotten or perhaps they could not simply understand that we have our own kind of democracy. It is a disorderly kind of democracy and it should really change, but it works in a way that makes the Filipinos the trendsetter in the region. We have a strong civil society that is not present somewhere else. Filipinos have to resort to direct participation because of the weakness of democratic institutions. That should be addressed and that is the challenge of EDSA 2, we have to create all the necessary impetus now to make sure that we will not go back to the usual order of things.

Many people are not euphoric with EDSA 2, but at least the renewed vigilance of the Filipinos could be something to be optimistic about. I agree with the skepticism about Arroyo and her programs, but a social, political, and economic overhaul is a long term task. Nobody is expecting that from EDSA 2. The anti-trapo sentiment though is getting bigger, those trapos who showed up at EDSA were booed loudly, the crowd threw plastic cups to some even to Mercado—that sentiment if properly shaped and handled by the small alternative parties coming from the left could help in changing the political culture. The sour graping among the trapos now are making the unorganised among the EDSA crowd interested to join organisations.

About the extreme left, well it is their classic united front strategy. They helped Arroyo win because they are following that logic support the emerging forces and win over the middle. They are ready to break with Arroyo anytime soon but their presence in EDSA and Mendiola has given them the legitimacy now to criticize her and claim their role in toppling Estrada. A lesson of EDSA 1.

Perhaps the writer should not limit his analysis to some frameworks of old. EDSA 2 is more than a scheme of the usual suspects. And, yes it is far from over.

Yours, DG

Dear DG,

Having carefully read through your objections to my January 31 article “Behind the façade of People Power: Philippine military and big business join hands to oust Estrada,” I can find nothing that seriously challenges the analysis put forward in that article on the events that led to the insertion of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo as President.

You refer to my “gross mistakes,” “unfair interpretation” and misunderstandings of the Philippine political culture but nowhere do you provide any evidence for your allegations. In fact, on closer examination, you appear to agree, at least in a qualified way, with the assessment that the demonstrations calling for Estrada's removal were largely middle class, that the military was involved in various plots, and that Arroyo has been giving “the plum jobs” to “Ramos boys”.

Your main criticism is a general one: that the article “undermines the role of the people” and “scoffs at a real demonstration of direct participation by the people”. Your uncritical adulation of the anti-Estrada protests diverts attention from the crucial issues that have to be examined in assessing any movement: on what political program was it based, who led it and what was the outcome? Invariably those who glorify spontaneous movements are, either consciously or unconsciously, covering up for their own political role and responsibilities in the given situation.

The World Socialist Web Site does not scoff at the working class or the broader layers of the urban and rural poor in the Philippines or anywhere else. Our perspective is rooted in the political struggle for the independent mobilisation of the working class at the head of the oppressed masses to refashion society from top to bottom along socialist lines. It is precisely for that reason that we seek to arm workers with an understanding of the political processes at work and the limitations of the existing leaderships and programs, and to warn them when they are being politically led by the nose for purposes that are inimical to their class interests. In fact one generally finds, when one scratches the surface, that behind all the empty hallelujahs and paeans to “the people” lies a contempt for the working class and a deep scepticism in its ability to rise to its historical tasks.

Let us examine the situation in the Philippines more closely.

You complain that the WSWS fails to have “an appreciation towards the gains, however small, for the left forces”. One is compelled to ask: what gains exactly are you talking about? How does the replacement of Estrada by Arroyo in any way advance the interests of working people in the Philippines?

As you are well aware, Arroyo is an establishment figure par excellence—born to one of the ruling families, daughter of a former president, wife of a wealthy businessman, etc., etc. Until last October, when it became clear that substantial sections of the ruling class wanted Estrada out, she was a senior member of his cabinet who had in no way differentiated herself from the administration's policies. She has repeatedly emphasised in the course of the last four or five months that she is prepared to press ahead with the pro-market reforms demanded by the IMF and international investors—that is, privatisations, cutbacks to government spending and further opening up of the Philippine economy. The result will be a further loss of jobs, price hikes, and rising levels of poverty and unemployment.

And, as elsewhere around the world, Arroyo will be forced to resort increasingly to authoritarian methods to impose such measures. As you admit yourself, Arroyo is already surrounding herself with Ramos and his “boys” who have close connections to sections of the military. While talking about the possibility of negotiating with the New Peoples Army of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and the Islamic separatists in southern Mindanao, Arroyo made a point of visiting military headquarters shortly after her installation and calling on the assembled generals to reduce “the fighting capabilities” of these groups. One can predict in advance that she will not hesitate to use the same methods against the working class and poor if protests begin to emerge against her administration.

The WSWS in no way supports Estrada who is a thoroughly venal, bourgeois politician—as are Arroyo and those around her. But one of the significant differences between the ousting of Marcos in 1986 (EDSA 1) and the removal of Estrada in 2001 (EDSA 2) is that Estrada won the 1998 elections with a significant majority, trouncing the candidates backed by Fidel Ramos and Cory Aquino. Posing as a friend of the poor, he was able to do so because of the widespread disaffection with the Ramos administration, which had been praised internationally for implementing the IMF's restructuring agenda. It is also worth noting that in 1998 at least a few of the Philippine left threw their lot in with Estrada and uncritically went along with his pro-poor demagogy.

In 1986, the military dictator Marcos was forced to flee the country when Ramos and a group of generals joined Aquino, with the support of the US, to forestall what was a growing mass movement against the dictatorship. In 2001, the role of so-called People Power was far more limited. The anti-Estrada protests over the previous year or so have been quite small by Philippine standards and, with the exception of a limited number of workers and poor mobilised by various left organisations, largely middle class in character. From the outset, the focus was largely on Estrada's alleged corruption and his links with various Marcos cronies, not on the impact of his policies on the living standards of working people. The ruling class notoriously uses such corruption scandals for their own purposes to stampede public opinion and engineer changes in the affairs of state.

The claim that the WSWS article is based on a crude conspiracy theory is nothing but a straw man. No one is suggesting that anti-Estrada demonstrations were simply the product of a conspiracy. Nor, however, were they simply a spontaneous expression of anger—the protests were encouraged and led by definite individuals, parties and organisations. When former Estrada ally Luis Singson publicly alleged in early October that the president had taken payoffs from illegal gambling racketeers and from provincial tobacco taxes, sections of big business, which were increasingly disgruntled with Estrada's failure to implement reforms and with the preferential treatment given to his business cronies, seized the opportunity.

Within a comparatively short period of time, most of the major business groups, sections of the press and state apparatus and defectors from the administration, under the international whip of the falling peso and share prices, threw their weight behind a campaign for Estrada's resignation, led by Aquino, Ramos and Archbishop Jaime Sin. When Estrada made clear that he would not go without a fight—impeachment proceedings were pushed through the lower house without debate or a vote. Yet despite the vigor of the campaign, its open backing by the Catholic Church and big business—along with the entire left coterie—the protests remained relatively small. In the main, the working class and poor remained on the sidelines, not because they necessarily supported Estrada but rather they had a healthy distrust of Arroyo and the big business-backed moves to oust him. By contrast, Estrada's allies were able to mobilise an estimated one million in Manila in November, indicating that he still had considerable support among layers of the poor.

The key turning point came on January 16 when the vote in the Senate made clear that Estrada was not going to be ousted through constitutional means. Those in the military hierarchy, big business circles, the Arroyo camp and in Estrada's increasingly shaky administration who had been discussing and in some cases plotting the removal of Estrada for months, decided that they had to move—if not the entire campaign threatened to fizzle. The growing size of the protests was a product of two factors—on the one hand, the impact of the sordid details of Estrada's affairs revealed in the trial and splashed across the media, and on the other, the emergence of a broad consensus in ruling circles that Estrada had to go, and go quickly.

The key to the removal of Estrada was not the size of the demonstrations at EDSA, much less the protest led by the “left” to Mendiola, but the fact that Estrada had lost the confidence of even his closest allies in the ruling elites. The exact sequence of events in the four days between the Senate vote and Arroyo's appointment has not been made public. But it is known that immediately after the Senate vote, Defence Secretary Orlando Mercado and Armed Forces chief General Angelo Reyes, who had already been in close discussion with Aquino, Ramos and Arroyo, began to plan his ousting. The coup de grace was delivered on January 19 when a large section of Estrada's cabinet along with the heads of the military and police openly declared for Arroyo and delivered an ultimatum to the president to step down immediately. The following day the Supreme Court voted unanimously to legitimise the ousting of Estrada and Arroyo was sworn in. The US and other major powers quickly hailed her installation.

In 1986, Aquino and Ramos felt compelled to act to head off a substantial mass opposition against Marcos that threatened to spill over into a movement for broader social and democratic demands. In 2000/2001, sections of the ruling elite worked might and main against a certain passive resistance of broad layers of the working class and poor, seeking to stoke up a protest movement to provide the pretext for the unconstitutional removal of a democratically elected president. Far from “Filipinos [being]... the true initiator, mobiliser, maintainer, and winner of EDSA 2,” the sentiments of those who were involved in the protests were exploited to install an administration that will quickly prove to be viciously anti-working class. Moreover, the danger is that EDSA II will set a future precedent for the removal of an elected government by sections of the state apparatus, working hand-in-hand with big business and their politicians.

The key role in duping working people was played by the Philippine left who for the most part supported Arroyo and the machinations to install her as president completely uncritically. The most craven support for Arroyo came from the Communist Party of the Philippines. Its ideologist-in-exile Jose Maria Sison insisted that there be no criticism of this scion of the Philippine establishment. It is impossible at a distance to have a full knowledge of the political positions of all the CPP splinter groups and other left organisations in Philippines but those that I have had a chance to examine, including the statements of your party Akbayan, offer at best muted criticisms of Arroyo. None of them provide an analysis of the situation let alone a perspective based on the political independence of the working class. The Akbayan statement on January 17 entitled “No turning back,” for instance, fails to even mention Arroyo.

You exclaim rhetorically in your email: “Isn't it rather arrogant that while the whole Philippine left is acknowledging the event as a successful mobilisation, your organisation simply read it as a conspiracy by the military and business?” But what is meant to be a telling point against the WSWS is in reality a damning indictment of the “whole Philippine left”. Having helped Arroyo and her cronies into office, the left parties and groups in the Philippines bear the political responsibility for the outcome of her policies for the working class.

The working class has to start to draw its own political lessons. You count it as a gain that “the anti-trapo [derogatory term for “traditional politician”] sentiment though is getting bigger, those trapos who showed up at EDSA were booed loudly, the crowd threw plastic cups to some even to [Estrada's Defence Secretary] Mercado [emphasis added]”. The real problem was that the popular disgust with bourgeois politicians stopped at Mercado and didn't extend to booing Arroyo off the stage, as well as Aquino and Ramos, along with all the left cheer squad. The reason why that did not take place raises a number of profound political and theoretical issues to which workers, students and intellectuals seeking to make sense out of the latest events must now turn.

The actions of various left parties in the Philippines in recent months are neither an accident nor a mistake but flow from a definite political perspective. None of the major groupings that claim to be socialist have ever broken in any fundamental sense from the nationalist and opportunist program of the CPP—in other words with Stalinism in all its different varieties.

It is not the place here to go into a detailed examination of the CPP's history and ideology. Suffice it to say, that at the core of its politics lies the thoroughly false conception that in a country of belated capitalist development, the bourgeoisie, or at least sections of it, can play a progressive role in resolving the outstanding national and democratic tasks—an end to imperialist oppression, land reform and democratic rights. In one way or another, whether in the Philippines, China or elsewhere, the various Stalinist parties rejected the fundamental premise of classical Marxism—the struggle to establish the political independence of the working class from all sections of the bourgeoisie. In doing so, the Stalinists have been responsible for one political disaster after another for working people throughout the region and internationally.

Your passing reference to the lessons of EDSA 1 is very revealing as it simply confirms that no fundamental reassessment of CPP's role was made by the Philippine left following the events of 1986. The CPP was founded in 1968 on the basis of the politics of Mao who, in rejecting any revolutionary role for the working class and embracing the peasantry as the main force of the revolution, was carrying Stalinism to its logical conclusion. His so-called strategy of peasant guerrilla warfare and “encircling the cities” was nothing new. Dressed up in the phraseology of “Marxism-Leninism,” Mao was simply reinventing the theories of peasant socialism that the Russian Marxists, in particular, had to fight politically in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Following Mao, the CPP's chief ideologist Sison wrote off the working class and the cities and oriented the party to the countryside and to the rural petty bourgeoisie or peasantry. So when the movement against Marcos erupted in the cities the CPP largely abstained. Its denunciations of Aquino as a “fascist” who was no different from the military dictator Marcos while very radical-sounding were nothing more than a pretext for failing to undertake a serious political struggle against Aquino for the leadership of the anti-Marcos protests. It was summed up in the CPP's attitude to the February 1986 elections: the party stood no candidate of its own and called for a passive “boycott” of the vote. The CPP's abstention allowed Aquino to maintain her hold over the People Power movement and for those sections of the army and big business backed by the US to rearrange state matters unchallenged.

Immediately after the new administration came to power the CPP drew the “lesson” that it had been wrong to make any criticism of Aquino and sought to reach a political accommodation with her. After his release from jail, Sison issued an appeal for “the Aquino government... to transform itself very soon into a coalition government which pursues the anti-imperialist and anti-feudal struggle and includes the revolutionary forces”—in other words, the CPP. In the first flush of the Aquino administration, the CPP's military wing, the New Peoples Army (NPA) entered into ceasefire talks and the CPP promoted the illusion that the government could be pressured to carry out land reform and the nationalisation of industry. Those illusions were shattered in January 1987 when the army opened fire at Mendiola Bridge on a peaceful march to the presidential palace by peasants demanding land—12 were killed and nearly 100 wounded.

What was common to the two apparently contradictory positions adopted by the CPP—first denouncing Aquino as “fascist” then offering her an alliance—was that the masses were left in the hands of Aquino. As is characteristic of radical organisations based on sections of the middle class, the CPP was hostile to any struggle based on the political independence of the working class. In both instances, the CPP's policies proved to be a disaster for the masses.

In 1993, in the aftermath of the 1986-87 events in the Philippines and the collapse of the Stalinist bureaucracies in the Soviet Union, the CPP was thrown into a crisis and split into two wings—the “reaffirmists” around Sison, who insisted on pursuing a Maoist orientation to guerrillaism, and the rejectionists, to which Akbayan is connected. The political differences, however, were purely tactical. None of the major groupings undertook any serious reexamination of the political roots of Stalinism, and, as a result, maintained their nationalist and opportunist orientation to various sections of the ruling class. As a result, in the latest crisis, all of the left groups now base themselves on the same “lesson” drawn by Sison in 1986—the necessity under the banner of “the united front strategy” to form opportunist alliances with so-called progressive bourgeois leaders, whether Arroyo or someone else.

In the more than 50 years since Philippine independence in 1946, the ruling class has proven completely incapable of meeting the aspirations of ordinary working people for basic democratic rights and a decent standard of living. Many of the wealthy families who make up the political establishment have landed interests and are thus unable to address the needs of small farmers and the rural poor. For more than two decades, successive governments under Marcos, Aquino, Ramos and Estrada have waged a brutal war against Islamic separatists in southern Mindanao—one of the most impoverished areas of the Philippines—which has cost an estimated 120,000 lives.

It is precisely the inability of any section of the capitalist class to meet the needs of the peasantry and urban poor that opens up the possibility for the working class winning these downtrodden social layers to its side in a struggle for power and the formation of a workers' and peasants' government. That possibility only exists, however, insofar as a revolutionary party exists and fights for the political independence of the working class against all those who would seek to confine its struggles within the framework of national bourgeois politics. Having come to power, such a government would, in order to provide for the social needs of the masses, be compelled to make inroads into the existing bastions of private wealth and privilege and thus to extend the political struggle to the international arena as part of the world socialist revolution. In outline, these were the conceptions first elaborated in 1905-06 by Leon Trotsky in his groundbreaking theory of Permanent Revolution, which was vindicated, in the positive sense, in the events of the Russian Revolution, and many times in the negative sense, often tragically, since then.

There are no doubt critically-minded workers, students and intellectuals in the Philippines who are disturbed at what is tantamount to a coup d'etat carried out by the state apparatus, big business and the political establishment then rubberstamped by the Supreme Court. Increasingly, they will question the politically criminal role of the so-called left in providing a “People Power” cover for the whole affair. We would encourage them to begin to make a serious study of the writings of Leon Trotsky and the Trotskyist movement—the International Committee of the Fourth International—which publishes the World Socialist Web Site.

Yours sincerely,

Peter Symonds
World Socialist Web Site

See Also:
Behind the façade of People Power
Philippine military and big business join hands to oust Estrada
[31 January 2001]
Permanent Revolution and the National Question Today
[A lecture by David North, February 1993]