The demonstration calls attention to itself in two respects. First, because it occurred after that particular military challenge had been defeated, it celebrated—rather than contributed to—the government’s victory. Second, and perhaps more obviously, a motorcade is a strange form of collective action in a developing setting because it cannot help but exclude those with the most material basis for social activism. The 1987 motorcade seems significant because, at precisely the moment the popular movement chose to commemorate, rather than recreate, its popular intervention of 1986, it adopted a form of praxis which excluded the working classes.
I wish in this piece to regard that August 1987 demonstration as a singular moment in a waning protest wave which had peaked a year and a half earlier. This coincidence of the popular movement’s spectatorship, on the one hand, and its exclusionary mode of praxis (separating, in this case, those who drove cars from those who walked) is emblematic of larger changes afoot in Philippine politics, and particularly in Philippine protest. I will also elaborate my understanding of demobilization as a process wherein changing external conditions (i.e. state form, the posture and availability of movement allies) alter the interrelationships between the constituencies allied within the movement. Accordingly, I will view demobilization not as a mere cessation of activity, but as the product of conflicts which arose between movement sub-groups as they attempted to advance—or define—collective goals, and as a product of the dilemma that these disagreements created for cadres.
PEOPLE POWER II: PROTEST AS COMMEMORATION
Scant months after the February 1986 popular uprising, glossy coffee table books recounting the four day adventure were already in the nation’s bookstores. On gallery quality pages, rich photographs and heroic prose described Corazon Aquino’s presidential campaign leading to the extended mass action in Manila’s streets and the dictatorship’s eventual flight. [1] These volumes quickly replaced similarly packaged New Society mythologies as the valorized objects of perusal in marble-floored Philippine salas. In a more popular vein, the Philippine Star newspaper ran an extended series of articles in which the participants related their individual experience of “people power,” in what was supposed to be a many-voice history of the event. These different commemorations placed a certain punctuation mark on the activism that brought down strongman Ferdinand Marcos; the story’s major movements having been completed by mid-1986, little remained but to celebrate the event
The post-Marcos scenario brought a new texture to Philippine protest, mainly due to realignments within the ranks of the broad anti-dictatorship movement. [2] Thenational democratic (ND) network’s boycott of the 1986 presidential elections marginalized the NDs under the subsequent dispensation. [3] That the national democrats at the time maintained the largest organized constituency and had fought the dictatorship since 1972 proved inconsequential when post-election protests produced the 250,000-strong demonstration that finally overthrew Marcos. Since virtually everyone regarded these demonstrations as an extension of that electoral process, the NDs’ boycott placed them outside of the Aquino popular juggernaut. Indeed, following its boycott, the national democratic movement staged almost no demonstrations until Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU) labor leader, Rolando Olalia, was murdered in October of 1986. [4] In the vacuum, other political forces—mainly those committed to Aquino’s presidency from the movement’s moderate flank—sought to consolidate their gains by seeking access to and participation in the emerging Philippine state. [5]
Two discontinuities between movement form and substance, signaling this realignment, surfaced in protest activity during this time. On the one hand, a radical patina persistently overlay demonstrations which, at their core, represented the most moderate and state-supporting activities. On the other hand, this radicalism found its clearest outward expression in the consumption and conspicuous display of technologies so expensive as to be available only to social strata more or less consistently opposed to any radical social transformation.
Anyone sifting through patterns of political mobilization in the immediate postMarcos period would perhaps conclude that their participants risked great personal danger. At a demonstration which launched the campaign to ratify the constitutional plebiscite, for example, marchers broke intermittently into the link-armed trot of a rally closing ranks. Observing the drizzle that fell that day, one organizer remarked that to start a march in the rain indicated good fortune—implying some power conjured against a lurking danger. Many participants wore squares of Mindanao cloth (tubaos) pulled over noses and mouths, a gesture originally intended both to protect against tear gas and conceal identity. Further intimations of danger could be found in the protest technology in evidence along the march. Many in the demonstration had festooned themselves with walkie-talkies and portable two-way radios, which linked them in a private and excluding dialogue, beyond the earshot—and beyond the economic reach—of working class marchers. Given these accents, one would not guess that the rally had been called to kick off a government campaign—in cooperation with, rather than against, state agencies. [6]
The proliferation of another sort of protest paraphernalia reinforces this discontinuity between movement form and purpose. By mid-1986, mini-vans routinely waded through demonstrations, air-conditioned reiterations of the open jeepneys that transport rally participants from the countryside and neighborhoods. Yet in contrast to the jeepneys, whose passengers alight to join the march, the vans became the primary mode of conduct along the march for a significant segment of the demonstration. For many, the protest march evolved thereby into a protest ride. Taken together, these two sorts of paraphernalia seem mutually contradictory; while some technology made rallies more comfortable and convenient, communications technology implied that participants must remain alert against (and un-comfortable in the presence of) some threat. Yet if the balance between danger and peace, radicalism and the status quo, seemed fine, a glance inside the vans, where matrons decked in yellow Cory T-shirts (“I stopped a Tank at EDSA”) passed sandwiches to well-scrubbed children, would dispatch this illusion; the demonstrations’ radical trope corresponded to neither the marchers’ political agenda nor the danger they risked through participation in the protest action. [7]
Viewed as commemorations rather than acts of resistance, however, the assemblies become more intelligible. Communications equipment, for example, probably protected marchers less than they indicated EDSA veterans’ status. At the time, historical commemoration—of Aquino’s death, of the declaration of martial law, of Andres Bonifacio’s life—proved more powerful than social or political grievances as a force to excite mobilization . As the various monuments to the EDSA struggle were erected—one thinks of the statue of Our Lady of EDSA and the Makati statue commemorating Benigno Aquino’s assassination—“people power” (as the government insisted on calling it) increasingly meant the commemoration of the February uprising, often sponsored by and supportive of, the state.
The tensions which existed between the form and content of elite activism had an effect on relationships between the demonstrations’ various class bases. As middle class activists conversed over two-way radios, megaphones spoke to a dustier and more ragged sort—the workers, farmers and slum dwellers who swelled these demonstrations. In part, these lower class participants validated the efforts of their higher class allies; they were important for their mass and their mass-ness. But their banners and chants also conveyed distinct and long-standing demands each notable in its appeal for tangible material improvement: land reform, new labor laws, and fair housing practices.
The apparent inconsistency between elite forms of protests and these grassroots demands reflects some uneasy alliances struck within and among the various political organizations of the popular movement. These alliances date back to the upsurge of spontaneous activism which crippled the Marcos state following Aquino’s assassination in 1983. The broad protest which followed that murder swept many unorganized elites (newspaper editors, television personalities, and business people) into the anti-dictatorship movement. These activists’ substantial stature meant that, as a loosely coordinated political force, they soon dominated the Aquino campaign, the post-election protest, and the immediate post-Marcos period. [8] Their ascendance, moreover, occasioned an activism which drove a wedge among the leaders of the long-standing political organizations—between those who sought to maximize the political opportunities which the hospitable but fluid state opened to them (even where these promised little immediate or direct benefit to mass constituencies) and those who stuck close to their constituencies, thereby risking marginalization from national political processes.
The very fluidity of this state heightened potential tensions within and between movement organizations. In contrast to the Marcos regime, whose firm and firmly repressive policies polarized society and inspired crisply drawn lines of opposition, the Aquino state was in every respect less defined. President Aquino—perhaps the only actor who clearly would be central in the emerging power structure—had by no means established her policy positions; this ambiguity made the standing of any movement demand (in the contest for influence in the emerging state) equally uncertain. The lines between the state and society were exceedingly obscure, and at the outset it was unclear whether activists or former Marcos leaders would dominate the emerging apparatus. Given this uncertain character, the state constituted both a target and arena of movement struggle. Each movement had to judge whether to forcefully assert mass demands, or to set such demands aside and ally with government against authoritarian aspirants. The choice itself exposed activists to competing risks. If they allied with government, they risked supporting an apparatus which might prove reactionary. On the other hand, if they imposed demands on the government, they risked weakening the state against (or driving it towards) conservative aspirants.
After the February 1986 uprising, the tactical alliance which had cemented the broad anti-Marcos movement became immediately more contentious. Organizations which formed basically in response to the growing political and economic crisis in the early eighties often perceived rapid and satisfactory change in the reconstitution of representative state structures. Indeed, the seventeen months following the popular uprising was a period of dramatic change: the Philippine state was restructured and acquired a new constitution, legislature, and several new national departments. Yet the social structure remained relatively unchanged by that transition, and organizations with a working class orientation continued to assert that economic disparity and poverty persisted under Aquino. Even where organizations developed some integrated perception of political change and social inertia (as most soon did) the relative importance (for praxis) of either participatory opportunities or social grievances was frequently in dispute. Often, although not always, these disputes divided along class lines. [9] That is, the conflict between an often middle class satisfaction with the national political transformation and a characteristically mass dismay at persistently ominous material conditions became a key dilemma for social movement organizations in the post-Marcos period.
The change accomplished by the 1986 transition (which inaugurated a procedurally liberal but politically undefined state), as well as the persistence of basic and long-standing grassroots demands, influenced and even transformed the inherent structures of all Philippine protest. Movement organizations responded to dilemmas posed by these structural changes in the way they chose among different tactics; these tactical choices, in turn, influenced subsequent politics. Three essential players were involved in making these choices—the movements’ elite and middle class allies and constituents, its working class base of support, and its organizational cadres. At its height, the anti-dictatorship movement had forged alliances between the three which, as the movement ebbed, began to unravel. Much of subsequent movement politics represents cadres’ efforts to stem this unraveling. The extent to which this dissent emerged in any one movement network, and its impact on movement politics, depends on the specific dynamics within given organizational networks.
Social democratic (SD) groups, both because of their strategic orientation and the relative dominance of economic elites in their leadership, were most divided by the attractions which participatory institutions worked on their middle class and elite members. SD leaders entered government office in significant numbers in Aquino’s first two years, both through electoral campaigns and as appointees. These new avenues of political activity, however, were not regarded as deviations from the SD political line, which had long anticipated participation in a liberal government. [10] Still, not all members of the SD network looked favorably on these interaction with government, and some younger generation activists, deeply involved in grassroots activism, bolted from the group to form the democratic socialist organization, Pandayan (Pandayan para sa Sosyalistang Pilipinas. Forge of a Socialist Philippines). [11]
The legal national democratic (ND) movement never publicly regarded Aquino’s brand of participatory democracy as particularly attractive. NDs assessed the Aquino government’s class orientation and composition to be similar in most respects to that of Marcos. [12] Moreover, organizations like the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and the New People’s Army (NPA) had accumulated interests in and resources devoted to struggle. Given this counterweight to such opportunities, very few ND efforts sought access to or power within the government. Still, individual members—again many with middle class or elite origins—were drawn to these opportunities, and conflict between their perspective and official ND positions led many outside of the network’s mainstream. [13] Their departure forestalled internal debates on strategy and tactics and allowed official ND policy to maintain a thoroughly oppositionist stance to the Aquino presidency, as well as to maintain its revolutionary state-power agenda. Furthermore, adherence to principles of democratic centralism, according to which the ND cadres could command mass participation at rallies, forestalled its own participatory crisis. [14]
Independent socialists in BISIG (Bukluran sa Ikauunlad ng Sosyalistang Isip at Gawa) as well as popular democrats (who from 1986 onward carved out an area of increasing autonomy and eventual independence from the ND movement) all expressed political visions based on leading a legal mass movement in the new political context. For these groups, as well as Pandayan, however, the potential tensions between different constituencies was perhaps the most pitched, for they had neither the authority of democratic centralism, nor so robust a belief in or capacity for government work so as to allow them to abandon protest. Such groups, therefore, most immediately experienced the divergence of class forces as a serious movement dilemma. [15]
THE CONJUNCTURAL DILEMMA
By 1987, the tension within movement organizations became much more pronounced. The relative consolidation of elite democracy moved the impetus for reform inside the framework of an institutional structure which was, both in itself and in its policy positions, inimical to popular influence. Although greatly indebted to the political movements for their initial power, government officials soon seemed intent on functioning in a more autonomous fashion, and decreased the extent to which they solicited popular participation in the policy process. [16] Nevertheless, at least in terms of procedure, things were generally running as a popularly approved constitution suggested they should. The overwhelming participation in parliamentary exercises demonstrated that the institutions of representative democracy captured the popular imagination; the constitutional plebiscite and 1987 national elections, for example, both drew over 80 percent of all registered voters. Yet the revolution in representative government had produced little of the social change which the movements’ mass bases demanded; their grievances continued to provide the material basis for protest against government and (when middle class allies grew satisfied with representative institutions) dissent over movement praxis.
The events surrounding the 1987 Honasan coup attempt illustrate how, and to what effect, divisions opened between movement constituencies. A proposed national oil price hike at the time touched off significant public outcry; the hardships caused by increased fuel prices allowed movements to mobilize and especially encouraged working class activism. In consequence, the largest protests under Aquino occurred during August 1987. This unrest, coupled with a demonstrable public dissatisfaction with Philippine governance, created an opportunity for the coup conspirators: the Reform the Armed Forces Movement (RAM) stepped into the strike-born turmoil to make their play for state power. The militarist threat drew most political movements to support the very civilian leadership they had lately criticized and to abandon their oil price protests. Hence the sequence of events and reactions which moved from mass protest, to attempted coup, and from there to defense of Aquino, raised serious tactical problems for movement cadres, since many people interpreted these events to mean that mass demands had inadvertently imperiled democratic gains. Cadres faced apparent (though by no means unresolvable) tensions between social advocacy and a defense of a largely democratic order. Moreover, as a closer examination of the events will reveal, both tactical programs had distinct class centers of gravity within the movements which rendered their synthesis still more problematic.
The strike against proposed oil price increases generated immense and immediate support, particularly in the urban centers. Transport workers defending their own diminishing profits enjoyed substantial public sympathy, for increased gas prices one month would surely mean increased fares the next. Resistance to oil price increases forestalled both prospects and cemented a unity between commuters and transport workers. Moreover, the strike made it virtually impossible for commuters to travel to work, and so every driver who refused to ply a route created dozens of de facto strikers, regardless of their actual sympathy. Still, the loosely organized middle class, so prominent in demonstrations just months earlier, was markedly absent from the groups which marched to support the strike; elements from this strata, in fact, staged their own explicitly separate demonstration on August 21 to commemorate Aquino’s assassination. Despite this absence, the strike infused Philippine protest with a militancy that had been absent since Aquino’s special legislative powers had lapsed. [17]
The clear and immediate material goals also rendered the strike an important collective activity. As representative government settled in, appeals for reform became less promising than they had been under the revolutionary government; mass constituents had less cause to expect any return on their collective efforts, and political organizers re-evaluated the wisdom of expensive demonstrations. The oil price strike, in its moment, resolved this dilemma. It set clear and attainable objectives and required an organizationally inexpensive strike (in which workers withheld labor power) instead of a demonstration (in which marchers must be brought to a specific site). Moreover, the strikers set out to maintain an existing policy rather than move the government to enact a reform, and so inertia lay with, rather than against, the movement campaign. The oil price hike seemed an appealing movement tactic, and organization cadres from BAYAN (Bagong Alyansang Makabayan. New Nationalist Alliance), BISIG, Pandayan, and Volunteers for Popular Democracy were therefore very active in its build-up and mobilization. [18]
The Honasan coup attempt cut the national strike short. Its intense initial assault overran several military bases and broadcast media stations, and shot apprehension through the movement. Organizers canceled the strike, both because any chaos would probably work to the advantage of the coup conspiracy, and because they had their own vulnerabilities. [19] Cadres across the political spectrum devoted their energies to securing their organizational apparatus against the advent of martial law or military government. They identified sanctuaries, assigned code names, and drafted contingency plans. Many simply slipped into a cautious semi-hiding to await the struggle’s outcome. They did not, however, demonstrate to support civilian rule during the period when it was most at risk. [20]
The first anti-coup mobilization, the motorcade described in this paper’s opening pages, lent clear and unambiguous support to Aquino’s government. The demonstration, in fact, virtually excluded those who had recently challenged state policy and who threatened to muddy the clear message of support for Aquino with some criticism. At no point did the demonstration note or allude to the recent grievances which workers, slum dwellers, and movement cadres had brought before the government. Instead, in both its message and methodology, the motorcade suggested the growing gulf between the unorganized elite or middle-class yellow activists and the working class base on which most movement organizations rested. The demonstrators’ celebration of existing civilian government and their programmatic break with the working class movement also marked a definitive end to the generalized popular intervention in national government that persisted after EDSA. In lauding the government victory, the motorized demonstration indicated that many were willing to accept that the Aquino state both should and could act more or less independently of any social mobilization. Indeed, this orientation owed much to the government itself, which during the coup urged citizens to stay at home and away from the battle.
More organized anti-coup activity began over two weeks into September with the Kilusang para sa Kalayaan at Demokrasya (Movement for Peace and Democracy, or KKD). The KKD sought explicitly to involve more established movement organizations (primarily social democratic, popular democratic, socialist and liberal organizations) and to establish a longer-term organizational presence. In many ways, however, its resembled the earlier spontaneous motorcade protest. Like the earlier motorcade, the KKD demonstrations relied heavily on several prominent personalities with only loose ties to any movement organization. [21] The KKD’s class base, moreover, was more similar to the motorcade’s than to the transportation strike’s: the mini-vans and walkie-talkies were in evidence once more. [22] Its marches and rallies occurred after government troops had defeated RAM rebels (which was perhaps natural, from a logistical point of view). At last, the KKD launched several small rallies (eight hundred demonstrators, out of a projected 10,000, turned up for its inaugural mobilization) and disbanded about five weeks later after attracting indifferent support and generating little public attention: an offhand performance which thoroughly belied its pervasive rhetoric of vigilance and urgency.
National democratic groups did not participate in the KKD actions. ND statements at the time argued that the coup attempt represented a struggle between factions of an elite and authoritarian government, and that the people had no stake in its outcome. [23] Nevertheless, just after the KKD formed, the NDs launched their own coalitions, spurred on by the assassination of BAYAN Secretary-General Lean Alejandro. The National Movement for Civil Liberties (NMCL) refrained from lending any support to the existing civilian government, and concentrated instead on presenting resistance to government abridgments of civil and human rights. [24] Besides ND organizations, the NMCL contained independent socialists and popular democrats. It sponsored several small rallies and demonstrations which contained multi-class representatives, but lapsed into subsequent inactivity after several weeks. [25]
This sequence of events demonstrates a separation between the movement’s class constituencies. Upper and middle class mobilization during Marcos’s last three years had subsided, and activists from this strata generally returned to individual economic activity and lent little political or material support to collective actions. Even Honasan’s threat to representative democracy met only fleeting opposition from such activists, and few indeed continued to demonstrate for agrarian reform, urban poor welfare, and labor rights. While these working class demands remained relatively undiminished and still could attract the mass support in evidence at the national strike, working class collectives as a whole were in a general retreat from the broad mobilization of months before. Specifically, strictly national political campaigns, despite the threat of military rule, seldom attracted the large mass support they had just months before. Strikers aroused prior to the Honasan coup mounted no demonstration in its aftermath. No KKD rally contained any substantial working class contingent, even from groups that had served as the SD mass base; the NMCL did mobilize working class associations, but did so mainly because of strict ND discipline. The most successful working class rallies made more concrete and material demands, of which the oil price strike is a defining example.
The events of mid-1987, and particularly the culminating failure of the anti-coup coalitions, placed cadres in a quandary. On the one hand, movement organizations seemed further and further from achieving substantial policy reform and could no longer reasonably expect that any imminent collective victory might concretely improve mass members’ lives. Moreover, without the spontaneity which had propelled the mass movement until then, mobilization increasingly had to be orchestrated by movement cadres and underwritten by movement resources. Demonstration participants came more exclusively from political organizations’ memberships, and the pool of non-organized sympathizers evaporated. The entire burden of demonstration-related expenses—transportation, food, publicity—fell on organization shoulders. [26] Hence, as such reform-directed mobilizations became less effective, they grew more expensive: a classic dilemma of diminishing utility.
A similar cost-benefit dilemma ran through problems of organization maintenance. Organizational solidarities, in particular cross-class solidarities upon which Philippine ideological movements had constructed support, require maintenance. Impoverished activists have both the greatest material basis for resisting the status quo and the least material resources with which to mount such resistance. For working class or impoverished participants, activism which produces no collective or individual material improvement is both irrational and unsustainable. As the prospect of collective victories diminished, collective action aimed exclusively at large and inclusive goals—socialism, democracy, or the like— became less attractive investments. Social movement cadres needed to address more directly mass member concerns or risk losing this constituency. [27]
The dilemma that confronted movement cadres in 1987, therefore, had two faces. The first reflected an aspect of Philippine society: it showed that the opportunities for the sweeping reconfiguration of Philippine relations that seemed possible during 1986, while the structures of Philippine political and economic life remained somewhat suspended, had evaporated with the reinstitution of government. The dilemma’s second face revealed a troublesome aspect of the SMO leadership’s relationship with its mass base. Movement supporters could no longer afford the luxury of extraordinary movement participation which could promise no material improvement. Unless cadres took steps to decrease resource expenditure and increase the benefits that individuals gained from participation, they would likely have less success soliciting mass support or sustaining movement capacity, for national political activities would now require more effort.
THE LEFT’S RESPONSE
Across the left opposition, movement actors devised a range of solutions to their dilemma. While the underground left resumed armed struggle for state power, legal movements sought solutions in two organizational innovations. First, issue-based coalitions that represented narrow demands for specific reforms became the vehicles which most commonly sponsored demonstrations and protest. Before 1987 movement organizations had assembled their demands in the comparatively large categories of “democracy” and “socialism”; after 1987, they more frequently worked through sectoral-specific coalitions which advocated, for example, urban and agrarian land reform or labor rights. Sectoral coalitions attempted to solve the protest movement’s dilemma by extracting discrete demands from these larger packages, to more directly address a policy debate and more exactly represent mass member complaints. Second, movements began acting upon their members’ need for material relief by delivering livelihood resources directly to mass constituencies through NGO-administered programs.
The Congress for a People’s Agrarian Reform (CPAR) began during the second quarter of 1987 and was initially lauded as the very broadest coalition effort in contemporary Philippine movement history. [28] This praise implicitly compares CPAR with the previous high-water mark for unity-in-action: the anti-Marcos BAYAN initiative of 1985. In several significant respects, however, the comparison is not entirely appropriate. Sectoral coalitions sought specialized constituencies, segments of the underclass rather than its totality. They highlighted concrete demands previously subsumed within more comprehensive programs for Philippine society and attempted to build these into a coherent policy position. As sectoral coalitions more exactly represented mass grievances, they required fewer compromises from their constituents. Moreover, because their demands often centered around technical issues (e.g.. land retention limits or labor legislation) their organizers became specialists—NGO workers with technical areas of expertise—rather than the political generalists who serve on the leading committees of ideological movement organizations. Even where such specialists held different long-term visions for the Philippine state, they could frequently agree on a package of sectoral reforms. Hence precisely because sectoral coalitions were more manageable than political projects, they represented a partial solution to the movement’s dilemma.
Whatever other benefits these sectoral coalitions offered the popular movement—and there is evidence that, at least under Aquino, they offered the distinct advantage of flexibility [29]—they also posed collective action in a manner that seemed most likely to yield concrete reforms, and in terms which most closely approximated mass complaints. At a time when demands for democracy, socialism, or nationalism elicited less and less attention in the public debate, these coalitions attempted to revive mass interest in collective action by advancing their respective sectors’ economic struggles.
A second, and in many ways parallel attempt to solidify mass participation aimed even more directly at material grievances; from the middle of 1987, nongovernmental organizations attached to Philippine social movements began sprouting like mushrooms on a humid summer night. Private volunteer organizations had actually existed for years in the Philippines as elsewhere, often closely tied to church institutions and oriented towards charity work—the distribution of relief, resources, and religion. During martial law, some NGOs advocated a broader protection of human rights and provided free legal assistance; many shielded activists from direct state oppression by providing a legal institutional context for resistance activity. By 1986, and increasingly thereafter, however, a new wave of such groups devoted extraordinary attention to socioeconomic projects often funded by international donors and administered by community organizations. [30]
Under Aquino, NGOs offered movement cadres a new and perhaps more institutionally secure venue for their activity. Political movements had flourished as the exclusive counterpoint to the Marcos dictatorship, but enjoyed less widespread support as Aquino’s representative rule depolarized society. NGOs, however, thrived in the new climate. They did not require broad popular support, relying instead on institutional grants obtained through specific and concrete project proposals. Such concrete programs, moreover, multiplied precisely because the transformation in state rule occasioned changes among international donor organizations; agencies which consented to fund political activities against the unpopular Marcos regime felt less compelled to do so after 1986. [31] Furthermore, as the domestic elite and middle class demobilized, they withdrew support for protest. NGOs, whose community-based programs accorded more with international development and domestic civic-mindedness, thus enjoyed a distinct advantage over outrightly political organizations in mobilizing resources.
NGOs also transformed the cost-benefit calculus of both cadres’ and mass members’ participation, and so were instrumental in sustaining movement organizations. As endowed offices, NGOs could employ their staffs, which allowed activists a source of livelihood—a consideration which grew more important as society routinized and provided less and less material support for activists. NGOs also provided mass participants with exogenous resources administered by movement cadres rather than achieved through collective success. Since participants obtained these resources from allies rather than adversaries, their material advancement—and so incentive to participate—ceased exclusively to depend on collective victories and rested more with their participation in the collective project. Resources administered by movement NGOs underwrote participation regardless of the political climate or collective successes. Hence, many political collectives reconfigured themselves into non-governmental organizations; cadres who struggled against Marcos recast themselves as NGO workers under Aquino, but associated, nonetheless, with essentially the same mass base.
These two organizational developments—the rise of sectoral coalitions and of NGOs—reinforced one another and together marked the main contours of evolving movement politics. NGOs became central to sectoral coalitions as they more effectively controlled the technical expertise around which sectoral coalitions cemented their unities. Over time, as we shall see, NGOs within movement organizations asserted increasing autonomy and often even elaborated visions of social transformation that differed from those of any political organizations’. It would be a mistake, however, to read these later developments backwards to explain the initial NGO proliferation. [32] Whatever other roles NGOs have since acquired in Philippine society, they multiplied during the late 1980s within, and as part of, a demobilizing broad popular movement. As such, they represent experimental solutions to dilemmas which all movement organizations faced: how might they lead a mass base with immediate subsistence and security concerns in an atmosphere where movement access to, and influence within the polity was diminishing? Both the sectoral coalition and the NGO promised in some measure to resolve the dilemma by either tuning activism more exactly to mass needs and the larger political climate or by severing the connection between participatory incentives and collective benefits.
Though tactical experiments, these organizational innovations were in no sense politically neutral. Because sectoral coalitions strove for policy reforms, they anticipated some procedural democracy. As they worked toward the construction of community associations and self-help initiatives, NGOs perforce validated the (at least partly) civil character of society under Aquino. Both innovations, then, bore a significant political load, a situation which had two consequences. First, they worked to transform activism under Aquino. Second, the manner in which different movement organizations approached these new political expressions depended to a large extent on the character of their existing political arrangement and orientation. I will first examine the more general influences which the two innovations exercised, and then discuss their more particular expression within specific movement networks.
In important ways NGOs transformed activism. They frequently set out to implement some project—a socioeconomic or educational activity—for application to specific constituencies rather than on behalf of an entire class. NGO-based advocacy pursued the empowerment of communities to undertake their own development as an important collective end. This concentration on concrete accomplishments in specific communities soon acquired a coherence within movement discourse as a vision of social change alternative to the struggle for national power. Efforts to improve social and economic conditions incrementally captured the imagination of many, particularly as a ready answer to apparently failed statist transformative efforts elsewhere in the world. [33]
NGOs which worked in sectoral coalitions usually represented larger political movements; nevertheless, they also brought unique perspectives to coalition work and were particularly inclined to assume a more flexible stance towards government. As they acquired important positions within activist coalitions, NGOs therefore required that political activity not be exclusively a matter of protest and demonstration, and established that their main actors would bring consideration beyond broad mobilization of dissent to the fore. [34] Under NGO influence, coalitions incorporated a more explicit policy agenda into their advocacy, informed by the issues and experiences of communities. Besides indicating NGOs’ greater facility with more technical approaches to advocacy, these shifts also suggest major transformations in the currency of power pursued by movement collectives.
While protest organizations cast themselves in adversarial relationships with state authorities, NGOs find points of cooperation. Community organizers building long-term economic structures like cooperatives need assurance that these structures would not encounter official harassment; moved by this need, many NGOs cultivate congenial rather than adversarial relationships with local authorities. Moreover, government line agencies have some discretion over and resources for policy implementation. As NGOs sought incrementally to resolve social problems, such official resources represented concrete and undeniable opportunities. [35] NGOs began increasingly to ask how they might solve problems, rather than how they might mobilize resistance to state authority. As they did so, internal organizational programs acquired an importance to mass associations independent of, and not reducible, to their ability to mobilize for protest. [36]
As modes of activism changed under the influence of NGOs and sectoral coalitions, points of friction emerged between these newer institutions and more ideological movement organizations. The relationship between NGOs and funding agencies developed against what game theorists call the long shadow of the future; to systematically depart from technical and performance goals set forth in project proposals would prejudice an NGO’s future access to funds, and so its viability. Funders could insist that NGOs comply with these standards, [37] and they often needed to do so to justify their overseas programs at home. [38] NGOs’ institutional interests therefore became increasingly tied to performance and implementation standards, and while they enjoyed access to resources, NGOs could not endow political mobilizations. Material resources which previously had moved freely between movement institutions, less frequently underwrote political protest even as the once abundant social support for protest diminished. These constraints undercut the dominance of political protest in movement networks, especially relative to ascendant NGOs. Political protest ceased to represent the only expression of movement activity and in many cases was superseded by non-partisan community projects. [39]
Moreover, as NGOs developed extensive ties to mass populations, they became less inclined—given their pursuit of community-based programs—to expend human or material resources on massed national and political demonstrations or to quickly mobilize large and heterogeneous mass assemblies. NGOs usually limited their constituencies to sizes for which they could administer multi-faceted non-partisan community development programs. Such projects helped insure and enhance the bonds between NGO workers and their people’s organizations. Unlike political cadres, NGO organizers preferred to develop more comprehensive community programs for smaller, but more coherent associations. As NGOs acquired prominence, they therefore transformed the character of mass associations within the movement.
If NGOs and sectoral coalitions transformed political activism, they did not do so at a uniform pace—or in uniform directions—for all movement organizations. These organizational innovations entered into existing movement relations and dynamics, and they tended to produce distinct political activity in different movement networks. ND organizations approached sectoral coalitions mainly as an opportunity to broaden their alliances and avoid isolation on the movement’s left flank. ND organizations did not enter into these coalitions to maintain mass support, which was already provided for by democratic centralist policies. In consequence, the ND movement more easily subsumed individual and economic aspirations to larger political goals, and political cadres continued primarily to manage ND participation in sectoral coalitions. In fact, many ND organizations supported both sectoral and political demonstrations. The labor unions involved in the 1987 oil price strike, for instance, also turned out for NMCL rallies several weeks later, as did the Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP) which had marched in CPAR demonstrations weeks earlier. [40]
In contrast, virtually all movement networks to the right of the NDs ceded main elements of their representation in sectoral coalitions to NGO personnel, and key organizational leaders began to work out of NGOs. For instance, two of the popular democrats’ three most prominent leaders, Horacio Morales and Isagani Serrano, operated out of the Philippine Rural Reconstruction Movement, and that office itself attained virtual pre-eminence in the PD movement. Likewise, BISIG’s Karina David and Pandayan’s Dina Abad, while retaining central influence in their political movements, also assumed leadership of NGOs. These developments indicate important shifts within movements, as both resources and political initiative moved from political councils towards NGOs, even as many who had recently identified themselves as primarily political cadres also shifted offices. Essentially this meant that for most movement organizations, the politics of resistance and progressive activism became more closely bound to the advocacy of specific policy demands through the medium of sectoral coalitions under the increasingly prominent leadership of non-governmental organizations.
The divergence between ND and non-ND organizational patterns of activity represent contrasting attempts to cope with demobilization. While NGOs and sectoral advocacy emerged in all movement organizations of the left, they achieved something like dominance only in non-ND groups. The very security of ND cadres’ ties to their mass organizations insulated the movement apparatus from general trends away from protest and demonstration. In fact, the continued ability to mobilize large mass demonstrations with scant unorganized support arguably allowed NDs to envision for themselves a future which took little note of expanding civil and participatory opportunities, and wherein the redress of mass grievances continued to seem primarily dependent on state transformation. Predisposed to reject representative avenues proffered by what they viewed as a bourgeois state, comparatively few ND collectives seriously pursued reforms under Aquino, and instead concentrated their energies on the political confrontation with the State over national power. Groups with comparatively less ability to compel mass participation needed instead to coax it to the fore, and so to maintain organizational capacity. This effort drove them toward socioeconomic advocacy, produced both through less contentious civil demonstrations and self-help measures—both of which facilitated NGO proliferation, and more sharply transformed the character of activism. Hence while NDs relied on firm organizational discipline to maintain levels of overt activism, other groups attempted to wring participatory incentives from less contentious interactions with a liberalizing state.
The consequences for the demobilization of the Philippine legal movement seem twofold. On the one hand, the proliferation of NGOs produced an intricate honeycomb of institutions standing between grassroots communities and larger political structures. The far more centrally organized resistance to Marcos produced collective action which aggregated grievances into national programs and produced cross-class cooperation. NGOs continued to coordinate their activities in national policy positions, but increasing portions of their advocacy acquired a more specific and focused aspect. NGOs emphasized specific community problems and so took a narrower perspective on base-building and a more focused approach to the representation of grievances. Representation of bounded communities’ grievances and the prosecution of community-based programs emerged as successors to complex multi-class programs. Moreover, as the Philippine state opened more participatory points of access, movement organizations and sectoral coalitions once oriented almost exclusively towards protest evolved more into some combination of interest groups and service centers. NGOs’ orientation towards policy drew them into government deliberations and consultations.
This evolution completely altered the institutional structure which had previously functioned to mobilize mass demonstrations aimed at addressing a range of grievances. Before 1986, disparate grievances were assimilated into the general anti-Marcos chorus, with each discrete complaint representing an undifferentiated slice of national injustice; grievances were cast as interchangeable, which made them at once individually inexact and collectively equal. After 1987, advocacy became in most respects more precise, with narrowly defined issues, constituents, and audiences. This more exact representation of mass complaints, however, produced comparatively little incentive for cross-class solidarity and left many communities unrepresented. The new structures disaggregated resistance into discrete packages, and very likely will continue to do so. It is perhaps significant in this connection that water and electricity shortages during the early 1990s produced virtually no mass protest, despite the fundamental and material effect it produced over all social classes, including the bourgeoisie. Ironically, then, what began as two and a half years of the broadest Philippine mobilization since the turn of the century seems to have ended in structures which make “contagion”—Charles Tilly’s description of protest which spreads like wild-fire throughout a nation—less likely in the future. [41]
A second result of this pattern of demobilization has become evident in recent years. Among the cross-bloc unities that have developed, a pattern has established itself according to which the members of different political movement cadres—the secretary-generals principally—have begun to work together with increasing frequency on political coalitions such as the NMCL and the 1992 AKBAYAN (Kaakbay ng Sambayanan) electoral coalition. Similarly, unities forged between NGOs in such projects as the CODE-NGO (Caucus for Development—NGO) and the PCHRD (Philippines-Canada Human Resource Development Program) have grown deep and resilient, to the point where on several occasions they have superseded loyalties that exist between NGO workers and their political movements. [42] The pattern of demobilization which began in differential class responses to changing political conditions seems, therefore, to have taken on an organizational aspect as well, manifest at least to some extent in points of difference between NGOs and political organizations. [43]
CONCLUSION
I have endeavored to demonstrate that the proliferation of NGOs and consequent sectoral-specific approach to protest were responses to demobilization, and so it seems appropriate to conclude by redirecting attention from these tactical maneuvers back to demobilization itself. As I have described it, demobilization occurred as changes in the Philippine political structure upset the movement’s constituent alliances. The procedurally open state influenced activists from the bourgeoisie to shift their political participation away from street protests and towards parliamentary avenues. Movement cadres also fell under the spell of new state institutions and needed at least to consider the opportunities proffered by participatory avenues in the new government. Yet despite these changes, movements’ mass bases continued to labor under the weight of persistent socioeconomic and political grievances. The juxtaposition of liberal and representative political structures and socioeconomic hardship, then, represents the new terrain of movement activity which began to be shaped in 1986.
The most immediate reflection of these changes occurred in the division that opened between mass-based political organizations and the more spontaneous collectives of the urban bourgeoisie. The broad protest movement that unseated Marcos soon divided into two large groups, one intent on commemorating the EDSA struggle and the other committed to the prosecution of social restructuring based on a working class agenda. Even within this latter group, however, divisions emerged concerning how best to guide the organized left through the new political landscape.
New structural conditions forced a dilemma upon movement organizations which made existing patterns of protest untenable in the face of rapidly depleting resources. Before 1983, the movement grew slowly, and its leading organizations faced fairly limited resource requirements; the great post-1983 upsurge expanded the size of movement collectives, but also increased their social and material support. After 1986, however, middle class support (essential both as a source of resources and of influential popular pressure) waned as representative state institutions took root. This left movement organizations with fewer resources to use in directing their newly expanded mass collectives. Similar considerations influenced mass participation. Even during the height of the protest wave, a vision of material improvement, propelled by pervasive hardship, energized mass participation in protest movements. Members joined protest organizations as a cresting movement seemed to approach some definitive victory with tangible benefits. By 1987, however, three years of activism had produced scant material return, and many began looking beyond mere protest for other avenues to secure some relief. Some grassroots collectives fell into apparent inactivity and, as everyday conditions re-emerged, many adopted everyday forms of resistance. Significant sections of the broad mass base, however, sought material relief from within the movement structure, from a pool of movement resources (broadly conceived) rather than from adversaries.
I have argued that if all movement networks fell under similar structural influences, they responded in different manners. Where stronger organizational discipline existed, as in ND networks, cadres could fall back upon this organizational resource to bolster participation. In less disciplined collectives, cadres had more to meet mass material demands or expect that this mass constituency would shift allegiance away from them and turn elsewhere—to electoral candidates promising patronage, to village associations, to government programs—for such relief. For such movements—and increasingly even for ND organizations—sectoral coalitions and NGO-based development work represented the clearest solution to this dilemma. Both strategies were designed to address directly mass concerns and to grant movement collectives access to new pools of resources.
The extent to which the strategies have actually succeeded, of course, remain subject to debate. Some sympathetic observers have had to acknowledge that NGOs have often made little impact on mass communities, [44] while others make more sweeping claims of NGO successes. [45] I have demonstrated elsewhere that the extent or even validity of efforts to change directly mass members’ socioeconomic prospects through the redistribution of collective resources is itself a contested issue within movement alliances. Even where organizations have set out deliberately to provide resources for relief and rehabilitation, the mass communities may feel neglected and turn away from the movement. [46]
Nevertheless, the organizational legacy of NGOs and sectoral advocacy groups stands as one clear and clearly important result of the demobilization process. The institutionalization of NGOs has established structures that will likely influence Philippine protest for the foreseeable future. NGOs break the most collective expressions of mass grievance into more specific grievances which are then addressed through constituency-specific advocacy programs which can work directly to alleviate such grievances. As NGOs do more for specific sections of the Philippine underclass (i.e. their participant-beneficiaries) they also diminish the chances for broad and multi-class mobilization. Therefore, in place of the massed demonstrations with a broad national agenda of the sort which so often occurred during the mid-1980s, those who observe Philippine protest may look instead for smaller-scale and more specific patterns of interest representation. If these developments seem to promise a more civil pattern of interest representation, they perhaps also risk leaving the interests of unorganized sections of the working class unrepresented. Doubtlessly, however, the ground which these newer agencies and more ideological political movement organizations share will become one of the terrains where the future of Philippine protest is decided. [47]
Vincent G. Boudreau
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