How can marginalized sectors help themselves fight inequality and social structures?

The editorial “Poor yet to feel fruits of GDP growth” (5/15/23) once again depicts our country’s perennial challenge to rectify the gross disproportion of power and benefits in Philippine society and transform it from one whose elites control a political economy sustained by what John Paul II described as the “all-consuming desire for profit and thirst for power” into one that promotes a certain equilibrium based on the values of equality, solidarity, and the common good. Brilliant as the editorial may be, it raises a few troubling questions that demand answers to right the terrible wrongs inflicted on the many among us who have survived in quiet desperation.

First, is there a need to go beyond the present limits of social science and invoke an understanding of the human person and society that aligns with our collective values and norms, such as “pakikipagkapwa,” “bayanihan,” and “pagmamalasakit” to the distressed “kapwa” tao among us? Is the human person selfish? Can he/she respond to an appeal to values or his/her self-interest only? Is he/she determined by the external or social forces of culture and psychological conditioning? Or does he/she have the capacity to transcend them to some degree to benefit the other? To be sure, there is a need to balance competing values of the requirements of the common good and the personal and social benefits of private property ownership.

However, sometimes, the right to own private property must be overridden for the sake of the more significant majority, especially in situations of abject and long-standing inequality like ours.

Second, is there a need to restructure our social institutions or establish society’s control over the distribution and use of wealth, and all forms of power, bringing them under the rule of law and orienting them toward our shared values and goals?

The problem of inequality is partly rooted in the whole social structures and systems of relationships that could shape, if not determine, how even people of goodwill choose to respond to the sufferings of each other.

More specifically, businesses and economies must be reorganized structurally, educational institutions must be made more accessible and available to the poor and disadvantaged students, and national debts must be reduced to channel their payments to the community’s health and social services and programs.

Third, is there a need to push the contradictions of our society to the point of peaceful and nonviolent revolution, assuming that only when the structural and systematic basis of our values has radically been structured will society and the human person change?

The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once said that in a situation of social injustice, power must and can be raised to dislodge which individuals or groups serve as agents of exploitation. Should we appeal to our shared values or rely on people’s power to bring about meaningful social change that will benefit the more significant majority? Given the definite limits in the capacity of ordinary mortals to give others what they rightly deserve and the natural egoism of social collectives, it would be a stretch of the imagination to assume that those who control economic and political power would be benevolent enough to effect meaningful change that will benefit the poor and the weak.

To know whether this is true, we must only remember what happened with the party list system. Thus, meaningful change can only come from those who stand to benefit in fighting for social change by organizing and actively seeking political and economic power to counterbalance that of other elitist and privileged groups.

NOEL G. ASIONES