LABAN NG MASA STATEMENT ON EDSA REVOLUTION AND THE 1987 CONSTITUTION

LABAN NG MASA STATEMENT ON EDSA REVOLUTION AND THE 1987 CONSTITUTION
Feb. 21, 2018

The spirit of the time was revolution.

One by one, Filipinos marched out into the streets to put an end to a nation’s nightmare. With flowers, rosaries, and yellow ribbons in hand, the proud populace was high on the promises of democracy. Year by year, regime by regime, and thirty-two years after the fact; the only memory of EDSA left is that it was neither a revolution nor a symbol of people power.

When the dust settled from the dictator’s downfall, the revolutionary government in power swiftly revealed its true allegiances. To the promise of peace, it answered with staunch support of paramilitary elements. To the promise of empowerment, it responded with handing over basic social services to the whims of the market, far from the people’s reach. To the promise of justice, it constructed the fiction of institutions easily crippled by the influence of wealth and power. To the promise of inclusion, it answered with the restoration of dynastic rule.

The cornerstone of this systematic mockery of the revolutionary spirit was solidified in the founding manifesto of the EDSA Republic. After President Aquino’s Proclamation No. 3 bestowed all power to the Lucky 50, individuals hand-picked by the President herself among millions of Filipinos clamoring to be heard, the 1987 Constitution was born. This shallow pluralism became untenable when demands proved to be too radical for a “revolutionary” government to allow. Disgusted by the facade of freedom while the nation was fastened to the shackles of capital and empire, the likes of Lino Brocka and Jaime Tadeo stormed out in rage against a document that guaranteed above all other rights, the protection of the right to private property.

Granted that the Constitution was able to enshrine the much-needed Bill of Rights and separation of powers between branches of government absent in the dark days under dictatorial rule, three decades of implementing the Constitution only laid bare the contradictions between its principles and the limits of elite democracy. There was virtually no change in the proportion of people living in poverty between 2000 and 2015. With the Asian Development Bank declaring that close to a quarter of the population is living in absolute poverty, the Philippines now has the third largest proportion of poor people in Southeast Asia, after Myanmar and Laos. A more accurate measure places the proportion of the poor to thirty-percent of the population, making the Filipino poor the worst-off in Southeast Asia.

Statistics may vary minimally but the conclusions are robust. What use is enshrining principles of social justice – labor rights, agrarian reform, indigenous peoples’ rights, democratic freedoms, national sovereignty, and basic human rights – when they are incompatible with the neoliberal policy direction and dynastic entrenchment pursued by the EDSA Republic? And after 32 years, these very contradictions paved the road for the return of the authoritarian threat the Constitution sought to preempt. The nation stood witness as a revolution degraded into a tragedy.

Laban ng Masa believes that the political imagination of the people cannot be constrained by the restrictions imposed by a piece of paper masquerading as the victory of a revolution. If EDSA were indeed a revolution, its victories were wrested from the many by the few. As the nation is once again enamored with the promise of radical change through another piece of paper that further secures its gains to fewer and fewer hands, how can we reclaim the spirit of a people’s revolution?