What was People Power?

Nearly 30 years after Edsa, there is as yet no authoritative history of the Marcos years, just as a critical history of their demise has yet to be written. In the meantime, it might be worth asking: What was Edsa? What made it such a singular event?

Let’s start with the name of the event itself. “Edsa” has, over the years, replaced “People Power” in popular discourse. The result has been to gloss over the political significance of the event with reference to its now barely recognizable location. Indeed, Edsa today is a far cry from that of 1986. One can hardly recognize such landmarks as Camp Crame and Camp Aguinaldo, so obscured have they become with the new buildings, the flyovers, and the MRT. To say “Edsa” today is to refer to a place that is gone, erased from the present and so consigned irretrievably to some mythical past. Replacing “People Power” with “Edsa” has blocked us from understanding just what exactly was so powerful about the event.

The power marshaled by the people at Edsa was, of course, that of nonviolence. In 1986, such nonviolence came as an entirely unexpected alternative to the violence of the Marcos state. Up till then, resistance to the dictatorship seemed to flourish only if it mimicked its violence by way of armed struggle. Often, such counterviolence had the unintended effect of intensifying state repression. The uprising at Edsa was quite different. Nonviolence overwhelmed the armed forces of Marcos. Prayers and songs proved more powerful than bullets. Massed bodies of nuns, housewives, students, workers, the poor, the wealthy and others turned back battle-hardened Marines. And they did so armed with nothing more than the fortitude and forbearance of their bodies.

Why was nonviolence so effective then? As a strategy, nonviolence consists of an appeal. It is a communicative act that demands to be heard. But in order to be heard, nonviolence must also set the conditions for its reception. Cardinal Jaime Sin took to the airwaves to call anyone who would listen to go to Edsa to support the soldiers who had made a stand at Crame, later joined by Fidel Ramos and Juan Ponce Enrile. His voice had an electrifying effect. Before computers and social media, radio played the crucial role of transmitting the coming of something. What that something was, no one quite knew yet. Sensing that something was about to happen, people came in droves, first out of curiosity, then, as the days progressed, out of excited expectation, eventually staying in the streets out of a deepening commitment. Anger at Marcos was sublimated into compassion and care for one another.

This is what nonviolence did: It made visible the capacity of people to turn to each other and forge relationships of mutual dependency. Driven to the streets by the call to help the soldiers who were facing danger, the people found themselves in danger as well. Total strangers of different social backgrounds were joined by the sudden and irresistible realization of what they had in common. This commonality consisted of two things: first, that they were all equally vulnerable to being attacked and killed; and second, that it was this shared condition of vulnerability that gave them a newfound basis of solidarity. They discovered that their precarious state was the source of their capacity to resist the state. Amid a growing danger, they found a saving power. Responding to the call of nonviolence, the people took on an open-ended responsibility for one another. They fed each other, nursed each other, prayed for each other, kept vigil over one another. Nonviolence is precisely this unconditional generosity against which the armed might of the dictatorship proved powerless. It is a condition that is often denoted by the Tagalog term damay and resonates with another term for pity, awa.

People Power manifested through nonviolence was possible only because people were willing to take care of each other, no matter who that other was. It meant breaking away from the tight circles of family and friends to risk living in the common ground of the streets, dwelling in the space of unbounded openness while taking on incalculable risks. Mutual responsibility required mutual sacrifice. It meant letting go, at least for the moment, of one’s familiar possessions. Especially for the wealthy and the middle class, being at Edsa meant giving up their hold on property. Confronted with the very real possibility of being killed, they chose to abandon the familiarity of their houses, cars, clothes, servants and all those other material goods that define their status. At Edsa, the rule of property was suspended. It was as if a kind of asceticism took hold, and people found themselves freed from the grip of property.

People Power then is twofold: It is the power founded on a common powerlessness refashioned into the basis for resistance and compassion, and it is the power to free oneself from the rule of property to dwell in common with others in all their otherness. It is this power that has been forgotten today. Coursed through acts of nonviolence, People Power is nothing less than the democratic reinvention of social life, which is to say, of a possible life yet to come.

Vicente L. Rafael teaches history at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is the author of several works on the cultural and political history of the Philippines.