An ‘Occupy’ movement in Manila?

It will be good news indeed if the Occupy Wall Street movement will find its way to Manila, but seriously I doubt it will. Apparently there is a call for worldwide protests come Oct. 29, timed for the G20 meeting in France. It will be even more worrisome if we meet the call simply by aping the Occupy movement through the usual orchestrated rallies by hired protesters. That would betray the authenticity of the voice and the genuineness of the public participation shown by the Occupy movement.

To start with, historically we have been moved less by grand causes and more by dramatic moments. At the height of the Marcos dictatorship, we used to say that Filipinos had lost their sense of outrage, and had come to accept the most egregious abuses of state power meekly and without protest. Until Ninoy Aquino was murdered at the airport tarmac. And then we saw the outrage that had been bottled up all that time erupt full-blown as it were at Sto. Domingo Church during his funeral march.

The grievances had been building up for sure, but it awaited a visible hero, much like how the Arab Spring began in Tunisia. The protests that toppled Tunisia’s president were triggered off by the death of a street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, who set himself on fire to protest humiliation by petty bureaucrats and harassment and confiscation of his wares by police.

In contrast, the Occupy movement covers a wide range of complaints about how the banks and corporations had brought about the economic downturn and yet kept paying themselves hefty bonuses while workingmen were laid off and went on welfare. That may be sufficient cause for outrage abroad, but locally we would need a tangible rallying point, whether a martyr, a trial or a pending law, that we Filipinos typically seek. OFWs had long suffered government neglect, until Flor Contemplacion was executed.

Second, historically Filipinos usually protest against the state and not against private power. In contrast, it’s called “Occupy Wall Street” precisely because it threatens the “iconic center of global capitalism.” It’s a protest against an economic system that fosters greed and social inequality, something Filipinos apparently consider part of the normal working of market forces beyond anybody’s control. Indeed, especially after Edsa 1, even when faced with abuse of corporate power, we would prefer to cast the problem as a failure of government to regulate. For example, even if the problem was caused by private abuse—say, insider trading—we preferred to look at regulatory failure and asked which government bigwig profited from the scam. It’s as if greed was perfectly okay for as long as it was pursued by freely transacting market players. Filipinos, as I love to say, are social Darwinists and would even applaud the success of private profit-seeking.

But consider this. There is actually an aspect of the Occupy movement that should endear it to the Filipino heart. The movement has been described in various ways: “anarchic in style and liberal in principle,” “noble but fractured and airy,” “diffuse,” a “leaderless” gaggle of activists, and finally, the airing of “societal grievances as carnival.” Hey, were they describing us?

Recall that that was exactly the mood in those dizzying days after the assassination of Ninoy Aquino. And that was also its strength. There was the alphabet soup of “cause-oriented” groups that sprouted all over in response to the national crisis of conscience. There was no central command orchestrating things. But that wasn’t a disadvantage. On the contrary, it allowed the full blossoming of Filipino creativity and energy.

I have read critics of the Occupy movement call their ideology “amorphous,” a “grab bag of sentiments” and causes that are “impossible to decipher,” an “eclectic mix of protesters” from tree-huggers and the jobless to “peace activists, indigenous rights activists, immigrant activists—they’re all here.” Their “politics zigzag wildly.” They “lack agreed-upon goals” and “specific demands.”

Sure that would be worrisome in the long-run. Indeed that was what worried me about the Tiananmen movement of 1989, that beyond the papier-mâché copy of the Statue of Liberty and widely shared complaints about favoritism and corruption, I couldn’t detect an alternative vision to the Maoist and then Dengist orthodoxy that reigned in the Middle Kingdom. A social movement must translate anger and frustration into concrete reforms that can be carried out in the real world.

But the Occupy movement is barely a month old this week, and had it presented us with a fully-written out Manifesto and a General Program of Action, I would in fact suspect it as the handiwork of some shadowy central committee foisting their will upon a hapless public. In other words, why judge the Occupy movement by the standards of the establishment they reject? Why ask if they have spokesmen and advocates in the institutional press and among elite politicians? Indeed the ideological mish-mash is precisely what enables them to mobilize without a central command.

If there is one thing they should learn from their Edsa 1 precursors in the Philippines, it is that at some point they would have to congeal around a core, substantive social agenda. The stage of ideological exuberance and experimentation will pass. Toward Edsa 1, we did not address—and indeed avoided—the duty to craft an alternative vision of the new democracy that would replace Marcos, beyond the ritual incantations about free elections and free speech, and look where it has brought us. How does one replicate the Occupy movement among a people preoccupied with form rather than substance?

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