Oligarchic storm looms

On May 9, Filipinos will elect a new president who will hold the key to the public vault and become commander in chief of the armed forces. In the dialectics of materialism, bread and spear have remained the sole ingredients of human survival since oligarchic Athens and republican Rome—a situation that was not reversed during biblical times.

The butter will be spread by the oligarchs, the privileged few, as power brokers, with carnival stars seducing the electorate to favor a candidate who will entrench their lofty birthright. Amid the pincers of inflation and diminished job opportunities, the downtrodden will ever be hopeful of salvation till the kingdom comes on earth, as it is in heaven.

Social reality has been and always will be the oppression and exploitation of one group, class or elite by another. People are not governed by prayer books but with ruthless discipline. Force, not consent, is the crucial factor in the relationship of people and is the basic element of politics.

But by stressing “consent of the governed,” the rule of an oligarchy is legitimized by conditions of wealth, class status or education. Consent is an aftermath of force—not merely physical—but consists in the possession of particular skills by the rulers. The point that matters in political action is the subjection of one person by another.

All government is, of necessity, oligarchic. The many, or the people, never “rule.” The actual business of ruling is always in the hands of the few. The constitutional question in “The Web of Government,” explains R.M. MacIver, concerns the relation of one to the few, but above all, the relation of the few who rule to the many who are ruled. If the few are not responsible to the many, this defines oligarchy.

I am concerned, in this essay, with demythologizing the current rhetoric of the people’s will, as if rule in a democracy were really conducted from the bottom up. Empirically, “the people” do not exist—they do only by legal fiction—and universal suffrage, whatever its symbolic significance, does not ensure the effective participation of the majority in decision-making.

Democracy in the literal sense of government of and by the people is a myth—a realistic impossibility. Lincoln’s eloquent formula will have to be rewritten, Maurice Duverger stressed in “Political Parties,” as “a government for the people by an elite sprung from the people.”

The voice of the people as the voice of god is historically mob rule—the corruption of democracy in Plato’s “Republic.” The usage originated in the eighth-century scholar Alcunin, who in an advice to Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman emperor, emphatically wrote: These people should not be listened to who keep shouting vox populi vox dei, for their riotousness is very close to madness! This same mobocracy chose the historical Christ over Barabbas for crucifixion on Mount Calvary. This is public opinion par excellence.

Whoever took part in an election, observed Gaetano Mosca in “The Ruling Class,” knows perfectly well that a candidate is not elected by voters but has him/herself elected by them, or his/her friends have him/her elected. A candidacy is always the work of a group of people united for a common purpose; it forces its will upon the disorganized majority. The formlessness of the mass, Robert Michels insisted in his study of Germany’s Social Democratic Party, buttressed by its psychological need for leadership, leads it inevitably to “eternal tutelage,” content to constitute its pedestal—the iron law of oligarchy.

Whether political power is in the hands of the few or the many, and whether its actual distribution in a society follows the pattern of oligarchy rather than that of democracy, can be decided only by a careful assessment of evidence.

Deep studies on the Philippine oligarchy abound: Onofre Corpus’ “Roots of the Filipino People,” Paul Hutchcroft’s “Oligarchs and Cronies in the Philippine State,” Suzy Nam’s “The Philippines’ Richest,” Francis Fukuyama’s “Political Order and Political Decay,” and Ming Wan’s “The Political Economy of East Asia” are only a few.

The studies concluded that the historically entrenched families shaped the government to serve their interests. Governance was characterized by political favors in exchange for support through the kinship system and external aid. This stultifies efficient tax collection and political reforms that conflict with oligarchic interests, undermining the operative ideals of the common good. Monopoly of land ownership, industry, political power and wealth created inequitable distribution of income and opportunity, thus nurturing the extreme poverty of the many.

The top 10 oligarchs listed by Forbes for 2015 are: Henry Sy, Lucio Tan, Enrique Razon Jr., Andrew Tan, John Gokongwei, David Consunji, George Ty, the Aboitiz family, Jaime Zobel de Ayala and Tony Tan Caktiong. Their wealth accounts for 17 percent of the gross domestic product. Their worth has risen to $50.6 billion from $11.1 billion in 2009—a 15-percent rise in five years. Yet the taxes they paid remained constant at $2 billion. Only half of the top 50 oligarchs are listed among the top taxpayers.

The political economy worsened incredibly during the daang matuwid nonsense, preventing poverty alleviation despite the expansion of GDP. Economic growth is obviously deformed.

“The government is in our pocket,” boasted a top corporate honcho in a public bidding of a multibillion-peso contract.

Andrew Tan of Megaworld has been on a buying binge in Europe in the past three years in the global liquor industry as the magnate from a capital-deficient Filipinas.

Riding roughshod over the Constitution that limits foreign control of public utilities to 40 percent, PLDT and Globe—controlled by the Zobels—invented “voting preferred shares” in a documentation to the Securities and Exchange Commission in October 2013, to comply with Art. 13, Sec. 11 of the Charter. PLDT’s Beneficial Trust Fund, chaired by Alberto del Rosario, bought the stocks of the preferred shares from the employees’ pension fund. PLDT’s huge profits are remitted to a Hong Kong company owned by Indonesian Anthoni Salim. Its front man is Manuel Pangilinan.

The oligarchs and the irresponsible elite will try to swing the presidential election in their utmost favor. Who will the wretched of the earth elect in revenge?

Reynaldo V. Silvestre is a former chief of the Armed Forces’ Office of Strategic and Special Studies, retired army colonel, bemedalled officer and multiawarded writer. He taught political theory at the University of the Philippines Manila when called to active duty as first lieutenant in 1975. He belongs to Class 1968 of the UP Vanguard, Diliman.

Editors’ Note. This column was re-edited at12:00 noon, to rephrase a quote pending direct attribution or proof of statement.