EDSA and Stealing a Revolution

(Third of a series on ‘Retaking EDSA’)

EDSA was not a revolution. In fact, it stole from the people the possibility of a true revolution.

Some of its diehard believers argue even until today that EDSA was a successful revolution because it achieved its goals of ousting Marcos.

In addition to the problematic argument that EDSA was planned and hence it had a well-defined goal, you end up confronting the equally problematic implication of such a claim: that it was all about Marcos.

EDSA is imaged as a personalistic uprising to banish one man and his cabal, but never to exorcise our society of the debilitating effects of pre-Marcos oligarchic rule and all its structural embodiments that took root in how elites gained authority and power, and how such gained legitimacy.

This is precisely how EDSA unfolded. The elites hijacked the narrative of a people’s anger. The coup of Juan Ponce Enrile and Fidel Ramos was not about the poverty and deprivation brought about by plundering cronies. Cardinal Sin’s call was to protect Enrile and Ramos from impending arrest. And Cory Aquino’s ascension to the presidency was not about peasants being given back their lands stolen by her cacique class, or liberating them from bondage. It was about her class taking an opening to retake its position as primary beneficiaries of an elitist political economy that was restored after EDSA.

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