 |
 |
| ON THE OTHER HAND |
| The Politics of Revolution By Antonio C. Abaya January 15, 2002 My call for a revolutionary government to take over the management of this country has, not unexpectedly, drawn mixed reactions from viewers on the Internet. On the one hand, there were those who readily acknowledged the need for revolutionary changes in Philippine society but despaired of the palpable lack of leaders in whom they could put their trust to make those changes without self- interest . On the other hand, there were those who were discomfited by the very idea of revolution, citing the risks involved and the certain prospects of a bloodbath. Risky? Of course, it is risky. Most everything worth doing is risky. Even crossing a street in Metro Manila is risky. EDSA 1 and EDSA 2 were risky. Is that an argument then for saying that those two events should not have been allowed to happen at all? Bloody? Not necessarily. Not all revolutions are bloody. Neither EDSA 1 nor EDSA 2 was bloody, even though, strictly speaking, they were mere uprisings or insurrections, not revolutions by any academic definition. They could have metamorphosed into revolutions, bloodless revolutions, but the leaders they brought to the fore had neither the temperament nor the inclination nor the audacity for revolution. In the case of Corazon Aquino, she had a limited understanding of politics, saw her historical mission as merely to restore Philippine democracy to its pre-1972 configuration and had no blueprint for the future. Not really her fault. Prior to 1985 the idea of becoming president had never entered her mind. She thus looked backwards, to the only political parameters she knew of, whereas a true revolutionary looks forward, to the New Jerusalem he or she is going to build.. The reason fewer and fewer people celebrate EDSA 1 each year is that nothing revolutionary happened in its wake. The middle class, the storm troopers of People Power, expected at least retribution against the many scoundrels of the Marcos regime. Yet even now, 15 years after the event, despite more than a hundred court cases against them, not a single Marcos family member, relative or crony has been punished for his/her crimes. You call that revolution? I don�t. EDSA 1 has become a ho-hum non-event. The same ignominious fate could await EDSA 2 if, again, nothing revolutionary happens in its wake, if the many scoundrels of the Estrada regime, beginning with Erap himself, go unpunished for their crimes. Political revolution in the Philippine context must involve overhauling the justice system, the electoral system, the economic system, the political system, etc, but it must begin and end with punishment for the cretins of the ancien regime who plundered the country. If the Arroyo Government cannot deliver on that, it cannot deliver on anything else. ***** The standard definition of revolution is the replacement of a dominant class by another class through an extra-constitutional process usually involving the violent and bloody overthrow of the existing counter-revolutionary government. This definition or variations thereof is/are favored by Marxist-Leninists whose ideology is based on class struggle as the defining dynamic in human society and who therefore claim an exclusive franchise on revolution. But events in the past 20 years, ironically in the very countries immersed in Marxism-Leninism, have stood that definition on its head. According to socialist folklore, the countries of Eastern Europe (Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, etc) went through �workers� revolutions� in the late 1940s that installed the communist parties in power. The historical truth, however, is that these countries were overrun by the victorious Soviet Army in its march to Berlin, as agreed upon by Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt in the Yalta Conference of February 1945. The communization of Eastern Europe in 1947-48 was therefore not revolutionary at all. But its de-communization, in 1989, was revolutionary in every sense of the word, and it happened without bloodshed, except in Romania. Within less than a month, millions of impoverished people literally walked out on their governments in a leaderless and totally unplanned mass migration on foot, by car, bicycle, train, or rowboat to Austria, West Germany and other points west. Without its skilled workers, its intellectuals, its young people, its artists and technocrats, its civil servants, its overworked women, the failed socialist states could not continue to function and their communist parties were forced out of power. A bloodless revolution that drastically altered the course of history and the way of life in half a dozen countries in a way that EDSA 1 failed to do in the Philippines. The 1917 Russian Revolution that brought to power Lenin�s Bolsheviks can be considered a classic example of revolution in which the dominant class, represented by the decadent aristocracy led by the Romanov dynasts, was overthrown in a prolonged, bloody and violent upheaval by another class, the proletariat whom the Bolshevik intellectuals claimed to represent. But the Second Russian Revolution, from 1989 to 1991, was just as revolutionary. The dominant class, this time none other than the nomenklatura of the Soviet Communist Party which had grown into a unique elite class in itself, was forced out of power by the same spontaneous and unplanned street action by ordinary citizens that drove out the communist parties from power in Eastern Europe. To be sure, the seeds of discontent were sown and nurtured by the glasnost and perestroika reforms of the visionary Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. But it was the rambunctious President Boris Yeltsin, Russia�s first elected leader in its 1,000-year history (Russia being the biggest and most important national entity in the Soviet Union), who pushed those reforms to their logical conclusion: the repudiation of 73 years of allegedly scientific socialism. Truly a revolution of epic proportions even though hardly anyone got killed in the process. In our own neighborhood, the market reforms begun by Deng Xiaoping in 1979 and continued by him in the 1980s and by his successor Jiang Zemin in the 1990s, with phenomenal and breathtaking success, must be considered as much a revolution as the rise to power of Mao Zedung in 1949 and the monumental egalitarian anthill that he built on the Chinese mainland in the next three decades. The seamless reversal in conventional wisdom placed the two revolutions back to back and if anyone was rendered unconscious by ideological whiplash from the sudden turnaround, there is no record of it, as the Chinese Communist Party sailed through the fluky winds without apparently needing to tack or jibe (non-sailors will have to ask their nautical friends what that means), but throwing overboard Mao�s widow Jiang Qing and her Gang of Four and leaving Joma Sison stranded on a sandbar looking like a fool. One moment it was �From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs!� The next moment it was �Get rich through hard work. To get rich is glorious!� Isn�t anything sacred anymore? But that�s what revolution is all about, not the number of people who get killed. This short exercise was meant to reassure the non-ideological burgis shaking in their boots that a) revolution is not necessarily bloody; b) revolution does not necessarily mean one class overthrowing another; and c) revolution is not the exclusive domain of the communists. Is President Arroyo listening? ***** This article appeared in the February 4,2002 issue of the Philippine Weekly Graphic magazine. |