THE NAME OF THE GAME – What It Is Not; What It Is.
The Gardener’s Tales (Second of a Series) By Charlie Avila
Manila, March 6, 2022 – To be clear at start, this game called elections has ordinarily NOT been a means for the capture of state power.
The Spaniards, the Americans and the Japanese captured state power here not through elections of any sort but by means of successful armed invasions.
However, all these monopolists or dictatorial powers introduced elections among locals as a GAME to make us feel like we were participating in power, and with their hopes that we would forget about rebelling against tyranny. Additionally, as a result, not the invaders but we the locals could now be blamed for any maladministration in that area which mattered most to people – the local level.
And so, we accepted elections as the name of the game of democracy. Of course, even then some were asking: Is it right to equate democracy with voting? Or might it not be that the ballot box does not automatically ensure democracy — that it might even be used as a tool to defeat the will of the majority –- in other words, to kill democracy?
Wasn’t the model, after all, the original Greek democracy that ran on slave labor, as did American democracy centuries later? And could we say that Greece had a democracy when less than half of the population had a right to vote, having already excluded slaves and Greek women from suffrage?
So, now we know: there is democracy and there is democracy. There is elitist oligarchic democracy and there is a more authentic social democracy.
In our lifetime, however, we have only known two dispensations: authoritarian regimes and oligarchic democracies. And the pattern of regime change has often been “cyclical” or a mere alternation between so-called democracy and dictatorship or authoritarianism.
Have we not seen so often how weak democracy gives way to authoritarianism only to be replaced in turn by seemingly stronger democracy? Yes, we have seen how State power cyclically moves from a few holders to one main holder, and then back to a few thereafter, but hardly to a real participative majority – not till now.
History has time and again demonstrated this iron law: without the empowerment of the majority populace – in other words, without social democracy or the rule of the many – that is, without people’s ownership of government and the means of production – oligarchy or the rule of the few always leads to monopoly rule.
It is time, then, to break the impasse and move out of this exasperatingly monotonous alternation that has only produced at best a poor Third World country – and one quite in progress now to becoming a de facto province of China.
But before all that, there is a distinction to be made which is so obvious but little understood, namely the duality of Philippine politics. Government, politics, elections in the Philippines are of two kinds – national and local. These two must be distinguished clearly. There is the national government (the state), and there are local governments.
Long before there was a Philippine government (national) as an institution, the Catholic Church was already here institutionally organized. And before the Catholic Church, there was Islam and the institution of the Sultanates and their systems of Madrasha. And ante-dating all of them were a bunch of “local governments” that did all right getting their communities to produce wealth for themselves and enough surpluses to trade heavily with neighboring kingdoms and empires for ten centuries straight – yes, a thousand years.
The old adage seems true: “You can truly own only what you have made.” Note, then, that never have Filipinos completely made a national government, ever; so, they’ve never got to own one.
“Government” was always imposed on us, and that is why our ownership of any national government has always been most dubious and at best confusing – though it can be argued that we have already made a lot of progress. After all, the hidden foreign powers cannot do without our local oligarchy, if that is any consolation; it certainly is a fact.
The years 1896-98 were an exception. We successfully waged a revolution against Spain and made our own government, not primarily by elections but by the power that grew out of the barrel of the gun – out of the guns and with the bolos of a new people who had achieved a new awareness of being one whole, a people conscious of being a nation that could and must now run rough shod over the centuries-old invading colonial power.
The elections after the 1946 American “grant of independence” met with an accident, as far as the hidden imperial powers were concerned. The Filipino people overwhelmingly voted for the candidates of the nationalist Democratic Alliance to Congress which would be enough to prevent a two-thirds vote for a so-called “parity amendment” to the Philippine constitution, so badly needed by the Americans for imperial business-as-usual.
An immediate solution was found: disqualify and evict the nationalist representatives from the Congress – end of nationalist story (supposedly), onward the neo-colonial game.
1986 was the next. Following another national farcical election, the people of Metro Manila waged a successful people’s urban insurrection (people-powered). However, the hidden imperial and oligarchic powers went to work fast to ensure no genuine social revolution would ensue but, rather, a grand restoration of liberal (i.e., oligarchic) democracy. And so, it happened.
Our democracy, then, is more an instrument for masking oligarchy or plutocracy than anything else. And the chief instrument of deception or the mask mutually embraced by both the ruled and the ruling class is our peculiar electoral system that never fails to excite the nation more than any national sport ever could.
Despite this fact that people buy and sell, kill and die for electoral victory, they would never, for all that, in their heart of hearts and in their sober moments, deny that the whole electoral exercise is “anything but…” a true manifestation of the people’s will.
No doubt about it then – social democracy can be the game changer.
More and more people are saying, “We do not want more of the same; we want authentic change.” We don’t want to drive out Monopoly and merely replace it again with Oligopoly that always leads back to a new Monopoly.
It is a vicious cycle which has become so monotonous – from Marcos to Cojuangco-Aquino, from Cojuangco-Aquino to Duterte, from Duterte-v-Marcos vs. a perceived new Cojuangco-Aquino-like formation
But the forces of the Many, most ironically, are so weak, and seemingly so few and far between…except that, on a scale of one to ten, they are not zero, and may just be able to rise quite fast, given the contradictions between the “One” and the “Few,” and given new methods of regime change, as when people take direct action on a massive scale – which has been called people power, and which can and may happen again.
The Many are rejecting not just the Rule of One – of a Tyrant or Dictator – but also the Rule of a Few for the benefit of merely a few – whether these few are those financially rich or educationally privileged or sociobiologically pedigreed — whatever.
This rejection, however, is not an easy thing to do. Because of what we have already seen as the colonial origins of elections in our country, we have tended down the decades and the years to change the very character of our politics from the serious pursuit of effective and fair governance to the conduct of ephemeral personality contests – seeking who is more beautiful, who is better at sports, who has more money, who had better grades at school or who, in any other form is holier-than-thou.
And always behind the personality contestants are the clans – NOT genuine political parties based on people’s interest groups whether of the farmers, the workers, and other basic sectors.
No wonder then that the two Houses of the Philippine Congress have practically been main business and “home” the last century for 160 families in a population of millions.
Having had two or more members “serve” in Congress, these clans account for more than one-fifth of the men and women who have been elected to the national legislature from 1907 to the present.
Business? How else will one call it when each “elected” representative can pocket a conservative hundred million pesos a year in pork barrel funds while each senator receives double that amount for a total minimum figure of some 30 billion pesos a year. Lest the “Many” wake up to these realities and take matters into their hands, the “Few” must make sure that the election game is rigged. (More to come…😊)